James Naismith's original basketball rules sell for $4.5 million

James Naismith’s Founding Rules of Basketball: In December 1891, a two-page typed document comprising a set of 13 rules to a new game was tacked up in a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA gym – and “Basket Ball” was born. The game was the invention of a 30-year old physical educator teacher named James Naismith, created to entertain a restless class of students during the winter months.

Photograph by: Sotheby's New York
, Photo Handout

The original rules of basketball, typed out on two pages by the sport's Canadian-born inventor James Naismith in December 1891, sold at an auction on Friday in New York for nearly $4.5 million — more than twice the expected price.

The one-of-a-kind artifact, described as the birth certificate of a game that has become one of the world's most important pastimes, had been in the possession of the Naismith family ever since the doctor and educator from Almonte, Ont., devised the sport in Springfield, Massachusetts, 119 years ago.

Harlem Globetrotters legend Curly Neal was on hand in the bidding room to present Naismith's rules to potential buyers, who were soon engaged in a high-stakes contest to possess the historic document.

After about 10 minutes, U.S. businessman David Booth and his wife Suzanne claimed the prize for $3.8 million. The buyer's premium will push the final price to about $4.44 million U.S.

Booth, an alumnus and benefactor of the University of Kansas, was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where Naismith was buried in 1939 after a long career as a coach and teacher at the university.

Naismith, born in the Ottawa-area village of Almonte in 1861, earned a degree at McGill University in Montreal before taking a job in the U.S. as a teacher at Springfield College.

In an effort to keep students fit during the winter months, he invented an indoor sport that used a soccer ball and elevated goals adapted from elements of a schoolyard game — Duck on a Rock — that Naismith had played as a child in Canada.

Duck on a Rock involved tossing stones with a high, arcing trajectory to knock another stone from a boulder that sat at the edge of a rural schoolhouse.

The very boulder used in the game by Naismith and his classmates is now on display at a museum in Almonte, located about 50 kilometres west of Ottawa.

In Springfield, Naismith had a college custodian hang two peach baskets on opposite walls of a YMCA gym to give his young players a raised shooting target.

Then, on two sheets of blank paper now yellowed from the passing decades, Naismith penned the words "Basket Ball" above a typed list of 13 rules governing the new sport.

"No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping or striking in any way the person of the opponent shall be allowed," reads rule No. 5.

And rule No. 8 stipulates that "a goal shall be made when the ball is thrown or batted from the grounds into the basket and stays there."

The phrase "into the basket" is hand-written in ink and inserted into the typed sentence. The phrase "and stays there" appears to indicate that Naismith drafted the rules before deciding to ask the custodian to cut out the bottoms of the baskets to permit continuous action rather than pausing to have participants retrieve the ball using a stepladder after each scoring play.

Many years later, after basketball had spread far and wide as one of the world's most popular sports, Naismith added another hand-written notation at the bottom of a second sheet of paper: "First draft of Basketball rules. Hung in the gym that the boys might learn the rules — Dec. 1891."

Naismith and his descendants "preserved one of the greatest documents in the history of sports and American culture," said Selby Kiffer, Sotheby's senior specialist for historic American manuscripts, in a statement ahead of Friday's sale.

"From this Magna Carta of the sport, hundreds of millions of players and fans around the world have experienced untold millions of hours of recreation, excitement, triumph — and, as always with sport, heartache."

Naismith lived long enough to see his sport played in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin before his death three years later.

Earlier this year, Postmedia News reported that three identical statues of a seated Naismith holding a basketball were to be erected at Springfield College, at the University of Kansas and at Almonte, his Canadian birthplace.

"I am very proud of my grandfather's achievements during his lifetime as well as the legacy of sportsmanship and teamwork that survives today," Naismith's grandson, Ian, had said in a Sotheby's statement announcing the sale of the rules. "The Naismith family has been the custodian of this treasure for more than 100 years and its sale will ensure that the principles James Naismith lived by and created the game of basketball upon will continue to influence generations of athletes around the world through the work of the Naismith International Basketball Foundation."

The U.S.-based foundation, which promotes the game and celebrates its history, will receive the bulk of the sale price.

Another historic artifact with a notable Canadian connection was sold by Sotheby's on Friday.

A tattered flag recovered from the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn — better known as Custer's Last Stand — sold for just over $2 million, the lower end of a pre-sale estimate that had ranged as high as $5 million.

The torn and bloodied banner had been recovered from the battlefield where Lt.-Col. George A. Custer and 200 other U.S. soldiers were killed in one of the pivotal moments in American history.

But the precise history of the flag, later donated to a Detroit museum, was unclear until a key discovery by Alberta historian George Kush.

He found a collection of century-old letters from a former U.S. soldier who had been involved in burying Custer's men after the battle.

The soldier, Samuel Alcott, later worked in Montreal and retired in Toronto, where Kush acquired letters that detailed the discovery of the flag and pinned down its provenance.

Another artifact with a Canadian link — an 1881 letter written by famed U.S. writer Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) to an aspiring Toronto humourist, Bruce Munro — failed to sell at the auction when the $30,000 reserve price was not reached by bidders.

James Naismith’s Founding Rules of Basketball: In December 1891, a two-page typed document comprising a set of 13 rules to a new game was tacked up in a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA gym – and “Basket Ball” was born. The game was the invention of a 30-year old physical educator teacher named James Naismith, created to entertain a restless class of students during the winter months.

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